Special Report: The Truth About Zawahiri’s Russian Sojourn Died with Him
It’s not like the media or Western governments were all that curious anyway (at least not publicly)
[In my announcement yesterday regarding TOP SECRET UMBRA’s second birthday, I explained that there will be periodic Special Reports on developing topics of high importance open to all subscribers … and one immediately landed, as if on cue.]
Last night, President Joe Biden announced to the nation the death of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the arch-terrorist who created Al-Qa’ida in 1998 with the late Osama bin Laden. Since the death of the latter jihadist at the hands of the U.S. military and intelligence services in Pakistan in May 2011, Zawahiri has headed AQ, making him one of the world’s most wanted men.
After 24 years of trying to get him – Zawahiri has been in the sights of U.S. intelligence since August 1998, when he played a key role in the East African embassy bombings – the Intelligence Community caught up with the Egyptian physician-turned-terrorist in Kabul, the Afghan capital. They found him in Sherpur, one of Kabul’s upscale districts, on Sunday morning when Zawahiri was taken out by a modified Hellfire missile fired from a CIA drone. The special missile, dubbed an R9X, has blades rather than a high explosive warhead. It’s basically a flying whirling Ginsu knife. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Zawahiri got put in something like a food processor.
That’s a fitting end for the 71-year-old terror leader, who had countless gallons of innocent blood on his hands. President Biden was careful to note that there was no “collateral damage”: nobody but Zawahiri got hurt in this very precision strike. This attack lessens a bit of the pain resulting from the Biden administration’s shambolic retreat from Kabul one year ago this month. It also reduces the effectiveness of AQ, which was already in questionable shape more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks.
As for the newly martyred Zawahiri himself, we can leave that verdict to future historians. Much has been written about him, including by this author, Needless to say he will be revered by some in perpetuity and reviled by many more. That said, some aspects of Zawahiri’s biography include intriguing black spots, none more mysterious than the half-year he spent in Russia in late 1996 and early 1997. This episode is known, it was covered in a few media accounts, vaguely. I first heard about it in Intelligence Community circles, and even there the story’s implications were so troubling that most spooks preferred to change the subject.
The only serious effort to understand Zawahiri’s Russian adventure by an informed author remains my analysis of it, published eight years ago. I will quote myself a bit to review my findings:
The outline of the story is clear. At about 4 am on December 1, 1996, Zawahiri was detained in southern Russia while attempting to enter Chechnya, the breakaway province of Moscow recently roiled by war. Accompanying the doctor in the van were two other radicals from Egypt and a Chechen guide. The Egyptians, wanted men in their home country and several others, were traveling under aliases; Zawahiri was “Abdullah Imam Mohammed Amin,” according to the Sudanese passport he carried, which had stamps from many countries – among them Yemen, Malaysia, Singapore – he had visited in the 20 months before his arrest.
Zawahiri’s two Egyptian companions were veteran mujahidin from Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the group Zawahiri had been associated with for years and had headed since 1993. Ahmad Salama Mabruk ran EIJ’s activities in Azerbaijan under the cover of a trading firm called Bavari-C, while Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi had extensive experience on jihad in parts of Asia.
The three Arabs were extensively interrogated by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which noted the inmates’ religious fervor, and the surprising support they received from Islamic organizations around the Muslim world. Twenty-six imams signed an appeal for the release of the three “businessmen”; others denounced Russian authorities of doing “the devil’s work” by detaining the hard-praying Muslims.
The FSB had ample reason to doubt the Arabs’ cover story. Among the items confiscated from the trio included details about bank accounts in Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, and the U.S. (specifically St. Louis), plus substantial cash in seven currencies. Their laptop computer was seized and subjected to forensic analysis by the FSB. “Mr. Amin,” whose Sudanese passport depicted a Western-dressed middle-aged man with a very short beard, arrived in Russia possessing two forged graduation certificates from Cairo University’s medical faculty, with differing dates. FSB investigation of Bavari-C, the EIJ front company in Baku, quickly determined that no such firm existed in Azerbaijan.
Radical Muslims in Russia, including one member of the Duma, pleaded for their release, explaining that the Arabs had come to Russia to “study the market for food trade.” Various activists from across the region likewise wrote letters on the men’s behalf, claiming they embodied “honesty and decency”; the advocates included leading Arab mujahidin, among them Tharwat Salah Shehata, later head of EIJ. When Shehata got permission to visit “Mr. Amin” in his prison cell, he was given an encrypted letter by the inmate; after the visit, the FSB claimed to have found $3,000 in the cell occupied by the Arabs.
When the case finally went to court in April 1997, “Mr. Amin” prayed hard and lied effectively, claiming that he had entered Russia “to find out the price for leather, medicine, and other goods.” Rejecting the prosecution’s request for a three-year sentence, the judge gave them six months each; almost immediately they were released, time served. The FSB returned the men their possessions, including the cash, communications gear, and the laptop. After their release, Zawahiri spent ten days clandestinely meeting with Islamists in Dagestan, which presumably had been the original purpose of his trip to the region. Shortly thereafter, he headed for Afghanistan to establish his fateful alliance with bin Laden, which was cemented in the mid-February 1998 announcement of a new partnership between the men and their organizations in a Global Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. Thus was al-Qa’ida officially born and the path to 9/11 was established.
I would love to tell you, dear reader, that over the intervening eight years, other investigative journalists have jumped on this tantalizing story … but that would be a lie. For reasons which I remain challenged to explain, my reporting pretty much fell down the memory hole. Neither have any Western governments, certainly not the American, decided to share anything which their intelligence services may know about this strange saga. My conclusions back in 2014 were highly tentative, by necessity, since we really don’t know what was going on between Zawahiri and the FSB:
Zawahiri has been tight-lipped about his half-year in Russia; his numerous writings and pronouncements about his life barely mention the tale. “God blinded them to our identities,” he explained. The FSB agrees that they failed to identify the leading holy warrior. “In 1997, Russian special services were not aware of al-Zawahiri,” elaborated an FSB spokesman in 2003: “However, later, using various databases, we managed to identify this former detainee.”
There are many reasons to doubt the official story told by both sides in the affair. In the first place, Zawahiri was one of the world’s most wanted terrorists in 1996, having played a leading role in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981; the doctor’s role in the subsequent public trial was televised in many countries. He was hardly a secret mujahid. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that a security service as proficient and thorough as the FSB did not have its interest piqued by the appearance of three Arab mystery men, bearing multiple identities and cash, in the middle of a warzone. It is equally difficult to accept that the FSB was unable to uncover the mysteries contained in Zawahiri’s laptop – as the Americans would do after many such laptops belonging to al-Qa’ida leadership were captured in Afghanistan after 9/11 – had the Russians really wanted to. Last, it can be assumed that the FSB would have tortured the Arabs to obtain information, had that been deemed necessary; and Zawahiri’s breaking by the Egyptian security service through torture in the 1980s is a matter of public record, and a subject of some remorse by the al-Qa’ida leader.
So, what was really going on here? I speculated, carefully:
While the idea that Russian intelligence may have developed a relationship with Zawahiri sounds fantastic to most in the West, the notion is far from implausible, and is consistent with known Soviet/Russian espionage practices. During the Cold War, the KGB had robust ties with many terrorist groups, including several from the Middle East. Its links to the PLO, including arms and training for cadres, were substantial for decades, while Palestinian groups like PFLP-GC were, in effect, wholly owned subsidiaries of the KGB. It would be naïve to think such ties evaporated with the Soviet Union. Moreover, anyone acquainted with the Russian practice of provokatsiya (provocation) as Moscow’s preferred counterterrorism technique, finds the idea of a Russian relationship with al-Qa’ida to be entirely plausible. Indeed, such is the easiest explanation for Zawahiri’s six months in Russian custody and sudden release back to wage jihad.
Regrettably, the last non-Russian who might be able to explain this weird account died on Sunday morning.
What, then, can we conclude about al-Qa’ida’s murky Russian connection? Unsurprisingly, Dr. Zawahiri has had little to say about his half-year adventure with the FSB. He has often criticized Russia and its policies, sometimes in vehement terms. Yet he speaks of Iran with equal venom, and al-Qa’ida’s discreet yet detectable relationship with Iranian intelligence goes back to at least 1996, and apparently continues to the present day.
His two Egyptian cellmates aren’t available to add details. Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi stayed in the Caucasus, was convicted in Egypt in 1998 on terrorism charges in absentia, receiving a ten-year sentence, and was reportedly killed in action in Chechnya in 2005. Ahmad Salama Mabruk was arrested in Azerbaijan in 1998 on terrorism charges, and was extradited to Egypt, where he was convicted on numerous charges and sent to prison. The FSB, to no one’s surprise, has said nothing publicly about this case except for a brief press release in 2003.
It is fanciful to suggest that any formal alliance exists between Moscow and al-Qa’ida; bin Laden’s mujahidin have worked with several foreign security agencies in the service of the jihad, but have never been willing to put themselves fully at the disposal of any of them.
Nevertheless, it seems justified, based on the available evidence, to suggest that Dr. Zawahiri reached a quid pro quo with Moscow while he was in FSB custody. That he underwent FSB training appears plausible; that there may be some kind of relationship even today between Russia and al-Qa’ida exists within the realm of possibility. Russia, with its large, growing, and potentially restless Muslim minority, would have ample motivation to reach terms with al-Qa’ida, in the hope of stemming radicalism.
I ended my piece with a suggestion for more research, “This vexing issue continues to offer more questions than answers, and needs additional research, particularly considering the state of relations between Moscow and the West,” yet nothing of substance has appeared since. With the death of Dr. Zawahiri, the only information which might shed light on what really happened would be first-person accounts from FSB officers or possible FSB records. The former seems like a death-wish in the current climate, while it should not be assumed that such sensitive paperwork would be retained by the Russian special services (if they have been retained they presumably are being guarded by Top Men in Moscow).
I’m regularly asked by readers when they want to know more than I can share, “Will we ever know the full truth about XYZ?” My stock reply is: “Ever is a long time.” It’s an especially long time in Russia.